Things people with small children should never take for granted...

So to say that grocery shopping here involves "sticker shock" would be a bit of an understatement. This increases when you take your two little ones with you that just HAVE to have those goldfish and fruit roll ups... Never in my life did I think I would pay $6 for a box of 6 fruit by the foot. There are many products here that are the same, but come in smaller, more expensive packages, like Doritos. We also noticed that Cheetos are very different - not as cheesy. So, you can get many things that bring "back home" comfort - you are just going to pay for it! Gotten a cake mix at Walmart for 97 cents recently? I just saw them at the grocery for over $7! I placed an order through the Foreign Buyers Club (check it out - you can see some of the prices - www.fbcusa.com/eng/ ) and thought it was a bargain to pay about $5 for a cake mix. I also found myself paying about $9 for a bag of Gold Medal All Purpose Flour. You can also check out www.expatexpress.com and see that it will cost us $25 to get a 12 pack of caffeine free Diet Pepsi!

We are doing a good job of adjusting and finding new things - there are some very yummy drinks we've tried and I found some yogurt that was better than any I had ever had before. Last night, we went for dinner at a friend's house and she had bugles although they were in a Japanese package but tasted the same. Need to go find that in the store! Costco is also here and I keep waiting to tag along with someone who has a car...

Speaking of money, that's been an interesting thing to adjust to as well. The money here is in yen and can easily be thought of as dollars - 100 yen is roughly 1 dollar. The thing here is that they deal in more cash than we do in the states. I rarely carried cash in my wallet back home, but here you have to have a lot ready at all times. Nothing like carrying a bill in your wallet that has 10000 on it! For those of you following along, that's about $100. They also use more coins - the smallest bill is 1000 yen ($10) and then everything else is coins - there's a 500, 100, 50, 10, 5, and 1. I'm slowly figuring it out...

Oh well, all this talk of grocery shopping reminds me that I need to get ready and go to the store myself - it's Sunday morning here and Nicholas will start soccer this afternoon. More to follow...